Epiphany 3B Call of the Disciples
Mark 1:14-20, January 24, 2021 St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
The Call
All our minds are most likely called to the happenings on January 20th of this week at the swearing in of a man and a woman who believe we called them to lead this country. How did they hear this call? One says he heard the call after he saw the violence in Charlottesville, where one race was speaking out violently against another in our country. The other says her upbringing in a minority and immigrant family gave her a voice and ears to hear the call.
We also hear today about the call of four of Jesus’s disciples, Simon, Andrew, James, and John. Why does Jesus pick them, and perhaps more astonishing, what prompts them to respond to that call?
We can surmise that Jesus realizes he cannot find hometown disciples in the hill country of Galilee in Nazareth. So, he journeys 20 miles down to a lakeside village of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Mark leaves the details to others. John tells us that Andrew and Simon are disciples of John the Baptist. John the Baptist points Andrew to Jesus, and Andrew brings Simon to Jesus.
Herbert O’Driscoll1 believes that Simon and Andrew come from a long line of fishermen. Jesus talks with the two brothers for several days about the world situation and the life they wish for, as they cast and mend their nets. They talk about living in an occupied country under a brutal foreign rule. Friends in the resistance movement called Zealots approach all three, who propose to make changes by violence. Jesus and Simon and Andrew see a common ground in their “no” response to this answer. Jesus questions the brothers closely about others who might want to make changes without violence. Andrew and Simon introduce Jesus to James and John. The five become friends. The four fishermen teach Jesus the art of fishing. Then one night on the beach around a roaring fire, Jesus tells his new friends, “Follow me, and we will fish for people.” The rest is history.
Sam Lloyd2 reminds us that most of the call stories in the Bible are pretty daunting. A voice comes out of a burning bush or down from heaven, or echoing out of the rafters of the Temple. God speaks, and a heroic prophet like Isaiah or Jeremiah proclaims with authority. If those stories are models for God calling us, we may feel left out.
Thank God for Jonah, whose story we hear, in part, in the Old Testament reading today. There is nothing impressive about this back-pedaling, timid, complaining fellow. Every child at Vacation Bible School can tell you the last thing Jonah wants is to answer a call. He just wants to be left alone. But that is not the M. O. of our God. God calls Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to demand the people repent of their evil ways and turn to God. Instead, Jonah gets on a boat headed as far in the opposite direction as he can go. Nineveh is the hated capital of the Assyrian Empire, now known as Iraq, and it was as hostile to Israel then, as it is now. Jonah has no intention of helping them escape doom.
Then a storm at sea threatens to kill everyone on the boat. The crew decides God is punishing them because Jonah is on board. They toss him into the sea, where he promptly lands inside the belly of a big fish for three days. There he composes a beautiful prayer and is finally spewed out on dry land. This story gets our attention.
In today’s part of the story, God tells Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh. Jonah delivers God’s message, and to the shock of everyone, especially Jonah, the people of Nineveh from the king on down repent, and God forgives them. The story ends with Jonah whining and unhappy because all of those terrible Assyrians have escaped the wrath of God.
Some of us may identify with Jonah more than with the four fishermen. Jonah is not interested in hearing God’s call and doesn’t like what God has in mind when he listens. Jonah’s story cuts right to the depths of our souls: the very human reality that often we really don’t want God to call us, because we’re afraid of what God might ask us to do.
We do want to have a sense of being close to God, but what if God asks us to deal with people we don’t like,/ forgive when we don’t want to,/ say hard things at work or at home when we’d rather not? What if God asks us point blank what we ourselves are doing to help people who are struggling in our city with poverty, inequality, or illness? What if God asks us to make more time to grow in our faith in our already struggling lives? //
Don’t overlook one key part of Jonah’s story. God never gives up on calling Jonah,/ even when he is running as hard as he can in the wrong direction. And God never gives up on those Assyrians either,/ the worst enemies of the Israelites, who are still precious in his sight. That’s the God we’re dealing with—one who won’t stop calling every one of us, Democrats, Republicans, black, white, brown, red, yellow, to bring about God’s kingdom.
We each have a specific gift to offer./
Being called can be elusive and mystical. It doesn’t mean we actually hear a voice, and it rarely means there was a certain moment or an earthshaking experience. For most of us, hearing a call means listening to our lives,/ and sorting through our gifts and passions,/ talking to advisors and friends,/ and trying to imagine this possibility or that,/ asking God to guide and inspire our seeking. Listening for God’s call means refusing to ask what we want for our life and focusing on what God wants from the life God gives us.
We look at our skills and abilities. We pay attention to our passions. We look backward at our life to trace a call by God from our earliest days. We see connections, hints, surprising turns where God has led us along all the way.
The issue isn’t whether we hear a clear call. It isn’t whether we are certain every day that we are doing exactly the right thing. It’s whether we sense ours is a called life,/ a life that is accountable to God and our baptismal covenant, a life that has a mission, even if we may have a hard time articulating it.//
So, what is your calling? What is the one unique, irreplaceable gift you have to give the world, whether you are 9 or 90?
Maybe you are at the place in your life where you are just starting to think about a call, or maybe you think it’s too late in life to hear a call.
I learn the answer to this truth some years ago, from another young boy in his early teens. Events in my life tell me I can only survive by intermittently becoming blind and deaf to the constant cacophony of the world by using alcohol to ease this pain. Slowly, I realize I am called to a different way of life, to answer another call to my family, to the God of my understanding and to my patients. As I tell this to my teen-aged son, John, he looks across the luncheon table at Trio’s restaurant and says, “Mom, it is never too late to change.” That has been my experience, and I offer wisdom from this young person to you./
What is your call? Frederick Beuchner3 says it is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger./ Deep gladness. What you do that leaves you with an overwhelming sense of peace, something you do which energizes you and those around you./
The world’s deep hunger. In a world where there is so much drudgery, grief, emptiness, fear, and pain, if we keep our eyes and ears and heart open, we will soon find that place./ The phone rings and we jump, not so much out of our skin/ as into our skin. With our eyes, ears, and heart open, the right place finds us… and in that day/ we will connect,/ listen,/ care,/ “fish for men… and women.”//
Even if you didn’t realize it/ when you tuned in this morning, God is seeking you out and calling you. God wants all of us—because there are so many things to do today and tomorrow, right in the midst of our life in this pandemic and our very troubled world and country,/ things that only you can do.//
Today,/ Simon, Andrew, James, and John,/ and even Jonah, are looking over Jesus’ shoulder and saying with him, “Come/ join us./ Bring your deep gladness/ to our world’s ever-present deep hunger.”
1Herbert O’Driscoll in A Greening of Imaginations, “Forming the Circle,” (Church Publishing 2019), pp. 36-37.
2 The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, “What is Your Calling?” Sermon at the National Cathedral, Epiphany 3B, January 25, 2009.
3Frederick, Buechner, in Secrets in the Dark,“The Calling of Voices,” (HarperSanFrancisco 2006), pp. 35-41.